Custom casts

You can create custom casts to have Laravel automatically format your Eloquent model data. Here's an example that capitalises a user's name when it is retrieved or changed.

class CapitalizeWordsCast implements CastsAttributes
{
    public function get($model, string $key, $value, array $attributes)
    {
        return ucwords($value);
    }
 
    public function set($model, string $key, $value, array $attributes)
    {
        return ucwords($value);
    }
}
 
class User extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'name'  => CapitalizeWordsCast::class,
        'email' => 'string',
    ];
}

Tip given by @mattkingshott